As you know, on January 28, the editor-in-chief of the RT channel and one of the leading Russian propagandists, Margarita Simonyan, made an extremely emotional speech at the Russian Donbass forum in Donetsk. Including, she said:
“The people of Donbass want to be able to be Russian. And we are obliged to provide them with this opportunity.
The people of Donbass want to have the right to speak Russian so that no one can ever take this right away from them. And we must give them that opportunity.
Donbass people want to live at home and be a part of our great, generous Motherland. And we owe it to them.
Mother Russia, take Donbass home!"
These words shocked the Russian opposition, many of them considered them deliberate "stuffing", recalling that usually such statements in Russia are made by Zhirinovsky. Something unimaginable is thrown into the information field and the attitude to this unimaginable society is measured.
Politician Leonid Gozman wrote about this:
“Judging by the activity of propagandists, it cannot be ruled out that some wise people in the Kremlin have decided that since there is nothing to lose with the West, it will not get any worse, then you can try to knock down the wave of protest with another geopolitical victory - the annexation of Donbass.
Nonsense, of course, Donbass is not Crimea, but our bosses will do it!"
However, the speaker of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova called Simonyan's statement on Donbass on the air of Dozhd her personal point of view. “This is her opinion, this is her point of view, this is her position. Moreover, she voiced it before in different forms".
And journalist Pavel Pryanikov calmly and judiciously told why neither the loyalists nor the opposition had anything to worry about the words of Simonyan:
“In the loyalist environment, there was active talk about the possible annexation of the LPNR to Russia. In my opinion, it looks like a political technology bluff. To distract the politicized part of Russians from the protests around Navalny. Smoke screen.
To begin with, such projects are done quickly, while the "enemy" is overwhelmed. As it was with the Crimea. And earlier - partly with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Russia officially recognized. In the case of the LPNR, there was no official recognition either. For all documents, incl. and international, Russia recognizes them as "special regions of Ukraine". We would like to add - we did it in the spring of 2014, when Ukraine, no matter how bitter it is to hear the Ukrainians, could be twisted as you wanted.
On the disadvantages of such an accession. For Russia, this would mean violent autarky from the West. They did not do this with Trump, a vegetable, indifferent to foreign policy, and then suddenly they decided to do it under the real hawk Biden. Well, it's stupidity. We may well get sanctions not only for the Russian national debt, for disconnecting from SWIFT, but also for the sale of our oil. It will only play into the hands of the Americans and all oil producers in the world. Prices will soar up to $ 80 per barrel higher, the United States will rapidly increase its oil production from the current 11 million barrels per day to 15 million, the rest of Russian exports will be closed by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries. A year later, no one will remember that Russia was once one of the main players in the oil market.
And Russia will officially become the second Iran, a rogue state. With a dollar on the black market for 250 rubles and rationing of goods and drugs.
You can, of course, consider the people in the Kremlin crazy, but not to such an extent as to get involved in such a story. They love money, monetocracy is the basis of our order, and no one is ready to sacrifice it, sitting in a barracks, albeit gilded. And Putin himself is unlikely to want to play the role of an ayatollah.
On the contrary, everything is still. These days, for the first time in 7 years, the prospect of improving relations with the United States loomed before Russia. For the first time in 11 years, Putin delivered a good speech in Davos. Germany openly takes the side of Russia in the fight for Nord Stream 2. Russia is the first (not counting China) to emerge from the second wave of Covid, which gives hope for a quick post-crisis recovery. The Russian vaccine "Sputnik-V" is taking one country after another, and Russia unexpectedly found in this vaccine a path both of international recognition and strengthening of foreign policy. I would say that over the past 7 years, for the first time, a light has dawned in Russia in terms of normalizing life. I think that Putin has already been given a folder in which they wrote down how much money Donbass will require from the Russian budget, which ended last year with a hole of 4.5 trillion rubles. rub.
PS
Russia spoke directly about the fate of Donbass a year ago, when it began issuing Russian passports en masse: go to Russia, we are waiting for you here. The LPR does not have a chance to restore normal, even at the pre-war level of 2013, in the coming decades. Donbass people themselves understand this, leaving this unfortunate territory of the New Dark Ages en masse..."